Apartment Nocturne
Music notes rise up
through the floorboards
of my drug apartment.
The sound is a heavy rainfall over the city
a spell
to make life seem bearable.
Neon streets are shining
with the promise of a blistering afterlife.
People are grinning,
walking towards the promenade,
their umbrellas
covered in painted dragons.
An indication of their ability to converse with devils.
There is a tightrope walker
outside my window,
balancing herself on thin piano wire.
It reminds me of cable TVs and transmissions
keeping me welded into place,
where I rummaged through the garbage of my intellect
for the smallest hint of tenderness.
Electricity is the blood
dictating this mood,
whether we are fulfilled or
just imitating the conman preaching on the subway.
Music fills the apartment
deconstructing my soul
into a billions jigsaw pieces–
I toss them out the window
onto the rain and desperation soaked streets below.
Poet at McDonald’s
The monk of poetry is writing
in a tiny pocket sized book
alone at McDonald’s.
Visions explode behind his eyes
as he scribbles for a few intense moments
then puts the book away
as if returning an organ back to his chest cavity.
My radical dreams of youth have been subdued.
This long experience of pain and ambivalence is somehow bearable−
and can even be quite intoxicating.
Only I can see the monk.
The more I investigate
the more he could be my twin
though living completely severed from society
within the body of his art.
The crumbs, the stray fries, are all immensely important.
The music in the restaurant
the music of conversations
the music of traffic
the music of birdsongs
the music of crying children
of workers
of flatulence
of belches
of art−
Subway Music
A man in a bird-mask is chanting
in the subway station.
His voice calls over the platforms,
the cry of a red-tailed hawk
trapped in an underground matrix of pornography.
In his throat lives a possessed being
who has crawled through the sewers of time
searching for a lost civilization of female warriors.
The echo shatters my hypnosis,
hitting me over the forehead
with a tuning-fork
until I wake up on the platform of the D train
harmonizing with a pretzel vendor in perfect pitch.
A thunderous emergency is born within me.
I don’t know whether to run or stand still,
to scream or continue to remain silent.
I hear someone singing me towards
across the tracks–
the lyrics are about there being world beyond reality
in that mercurial space,
of awkward pauses
and sullen ellipses.
Something is tempting me to cross
over this threshold of alienation.
I hear the song.
The melody calls me by name.
Backwoods Girl
She tiptoes
through the backwoods.
Shadows breathe
hesitantly
as her body glides between trees.
She moves to the music
of rippling water and
Nature’s chattering resonance.
The moon is pregnant,
a curved
black womb speaking
dark auguries.
She is the musing epiphany,
revealed through
a hidden
language of laughter
and sorrow.
She is standing
in the ruins of an abandoned garden,
letting the black leaves
ingest her honeycomb.
